Background

Power and Hubris

People who achieve significant power run the risk of succumbing to its proverbially corrupting tendencies, and developing dangerous, ultimately destructive, behaviours.

The striking uniformity of this phenomenon led Owen and Davidson (2009) to formulate it in psychiatric terms as a 'disorder of power', which they termed the 'Hubris syndrome' (HS).

Hubris is most likely to be encountered in leaders who have acquired absolute power, as such leaders are answerable to nobody. They also tend to be bolstered by a small band of conformers and colluders. 

Yet  the emergence of hubris has not been entirely prevented by the checks and balances that are built into the constitutional arrangements of modern democratic societies, such as limitations on Presidential or Prime Ministerial terms of office, and  the independence of executive and legislative branches of governments.

Nor is politics and government by any means the only sphere within which an individual can acquire and exercise, and therefore be corrupted by, power. Military leaders, holders of high office in the public sector, CEOs of large multinational businesses (Sadler-Smith, 2019), are all endowed with significant power, the reckless exercise of which can have catastrophic consequences. The emergence of hubris and the reasons behind it remain, therefore, of great contemporary importance in many spheres.

Given the destructive outcomes associated with hubristic leadership it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of the phenomenon and, if possible, to implement preventative measures.

Methodology

Identification of individuals who held power across different domains. Creation of databases with information based on their developmental, educational, behavioural, and experiential background from heterogeneous sources. Integration of data into a knowledge graph and analysis using machine and deep learning methodology and techniques. Extraction of patterns that will help us identify the factors that predispose to or protect from Hubris Syndrome.

Data Sources

The study will identify around 500 individuals who held power across five different occupational categories in the 20th Century: politics, business, the military, religion, and the professions (including teaching, medicine and the law). Personal and biographical characteristics will be integrated into the knowledge graph using data mining and integration techniques that are able to extract and merge relevant data.

Unstructured data will be harvested both from online information resources (eg, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Biography.com, Infoplease.com) and from print and broadcast media. Features relevant to the knowledge graph representation of leadership will include an individual’s developmental and educational history, their behavioural traits, professional experience, and their documented behaviours.

Markers of behaviour at different time points will be based on standardised representations of documented descriptions, but also on language used in speeches or other official communications, activity on social media and/or in the press, books and articles.

Knowledge Graph (KG)

A KG is ‘the intersection of the formal models able to represent facts of various types and levels of abstraction using a graph-based formalism. Knowledge representation models are characterised according to the represented facts and levels of abstraction’ (Vidal et al., 2019). Using a framework of data ontologies, the KG data format represents entities in terms not only of their properties but also the relationships between them.

The density and interconnectedness of this data format means that artificial intelligence techniques can be used to characterise the complex of factors responsible for the development of leadership Hubris, as well as to deduce new information, generate predictions and test hypotheses about its origins and mechanisms.